The uncomfortable truth about fake news

You hear a lot about ‘fake news’ these days. Politicians use it as a label for stories they don’t want you to believe. Pundits use it to explain results they didn’t see coming. And most of us, if we’re honest, have a nagging worry about the truth being hijacked by unscrupulous rogue states and alt-right conspiracy theorists.

Are we right to be worried?

A few months ago, researchers at MIT published a study in the journal Science about how news spreads on social media.

They analysed 126,000 stories posted on Twitter between 2006 and 2017 and found that false stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted than true ones.

They also found that the true stories took six times longer, on average, to reach an audience of 1,500 people.

In both cases, a massive discrepancy. And perhaps the most interesting finding from the research was that automated bots played no part in it.

As the authors of the study concluded:

‘False news spreads more than the truth, because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it… False news is more novel and people are more likely to share novel information’.

In other words, the reason fake news spreads faster and further than real news isn’t because the people who spread it are malicious or gullible or especially tech-savvy.

It’s because the fake news is more interesting – and we’d rather listen to an interesting lie than a dull truth.

That’s a lesson most organisations could learn from.

Most organisations go out of their way to present information in a formulaic and predictable way when they’re communicating with their workforce.

They use language that’s been carefully approved by committee (words that sound positive, but vague enough to be deniable if things don’t turn out as planned).

They repeat certain key phrases with mantra-like insistence, to ensure their messaging is ‘consistent’.

They strike a relentlessly upbeat tone, even when they’re talking about something everyone knows was a mess.

And then they wonder why the people in their organisation are far more interested in hearing about last night’s Love Island or rumours of a possible takeover.

The first rule of communication is that you can’t talk to people who aren’t listening.

If you want people to pay attention to what you’ve got to say, start by making sure it’s not dull.

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what’s this blog about?

Internal communication has come a long way in the last ten years (mostly because companies have figured out that customer experience is now far more important to their long-term success than advertising). But there’s still plenty of room for improvement. That’s what this blog is about – calling out the problems and sharing ideas about how to solve them…